Hand in hand with the development of this "epic" style goes the transition to realism which we find also in Storm's poems. In prose it is best represented by works like Eekenhof and Der Herr Etatsrat, or Hans and Heinz Kirch and Two-Souled. Here the poet shrinks from no harshness. We find striking portraits the lines of which are drawn with a sharp, unflattering touch. Psychic conditions of the most brutal kind are portrayed and are made the more telling because it is almost only their effects that are given. In the same way the external world stands chiefly before us in its appearances while the conditions that have led to these appearances are neglected. Finally, Storm endeavors to step beyond the bounds of pure narrative. He seizes upon material of a dramatic nature and seeks to retain—nay more, to bring out—its dramatic character, even in the epic form. In one of his letters he calls the "Novelle" the epic sister of the drama, and goes on to say that it treats of the deepest problems of human life and requires for its perfection to be centred about some conflict. Such are works like The Sons of the Senator, where individual will is pitted against individual will; Renate or At the Brewer's, where individuals struggle against a multitude who are sunk in error and superstition; and, above all, The Rider of the White Horse, where the individual wrestles with the mass, the man with the most elementary forces of nature.
The Rider of the White Horse is Storm's last complete work and also, as we believe, the one that best reflects the whole man, as far as that is possible with a poet of such varied development. The scene is laid in his home, which is characterized with vividness and grandeur in its setting of marsh and sea. Like the stories of his youth it glorifies love, the love of two beings who are faithful to each other unto death, and at the same time it touches themes which deeply occupied Storm in his age, such as the problem of heredity in Karsten Kurator, or the relation between father and son in Hans and Heinz Kirch or in Basch the Cooper. The charm of youth, to which our poet was always most susceptible, invests the chief characters, and they have that chaste reserve that holds all internal life sacred. Happiness is won, but it ends in tragedy, the tragedy which has taken the place of the resignation of his youthful works and which, after all, was more deeply rooted in Storm than the joyfulness that is sounded in Psyche. It is a man of sober intellect who tells the whole story and yet, like human life itself, it stands out against a mystic background. Remembrance of long ago has clarified everything, loving comprehension fills everything with deepest sympathy. It was granted to Storm to stand on a pinnacle of art at the end of his life, a pinnacle which he had to leave, but from which he did not need to descend.
[THEODOR STORM]
[THE RIDER OF THE WHITE HORSE (1888)]
TRANSLATED BY MURIEL ALMON
The story that I have to tell came to my knowledge more than half a century ago in the house of my great-grandmother, the wife of Senator Feddersen, when, sitting close up to her armchair one day, I was busy reading a number of some magazine bound in blue cardboard, either the Leipziger or Pappes Hamburger Lesefrüchte, I have forgotten which. I still recall with a tremor how the old lady of more than eighty years would now and then pass her soft hand caressingly over her great-grandchild's hair. She herself, and that day, have long been buried and I have sought in vain for those old pages, so I can just as little vouch for the truth of the facts as defend them if anyone should question them. Only one thing I can affirm, that although no outward circumstance has since revived them in my mind they have never vanished from my memory.